Abstract: Autistic traits (ATs) are various primary symptoms associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and are continuously distributed within the general population. Previous studies from non-tonal language backgrounds have demonstrated that autistic individuals show enhanced pitch perceptual abilities, yet encounter challenges in higher-level semantic integration involving pitch. Considering the comorbidity in autistic individuals, to clarify the underlying causes, whether neurotypical people with high autistic traits share similar challenges remains to be elucidated. Mandarin Chinese, relying on pitch changes at the syllable level as lexical tones to convey meaning, is ideal for exploring this issue. Consequently, our study explores whether high autistic traits associate with poorer pitch-semantic integration among neurotypical Mandarin-speaking adults, employing the event-related potentials (ERPs) technique. Fifteen high-autistic-trait adults and eighteen low-autistic-trait counterparts participated in an implicit semantic priming task, and their behavioral and neural responses were recorded. Results showed that there existed significant differences in the reaction time between the two groups while no such differences were found for N400 responses, indicating similar processing mechanism despite different autistic traits. Our findings suggest that it might be other factors, such as verbal abilities, rather than autistic traits per se, that might influence the higher-level semantic integration related to pitch.
原载Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024